This is about the things I see and wonder about or in which I find humor or human grace or may seem odd enough to be worth mention...

Sunday, September 7, 2014

PATTERSON
“PAT” GRISSOM

(February
27, 1925 – September 3, 2014)

The
Good Do Not Always Die Young

An extraordinary
man has left us. Perhaps he was more extraordinary to me than to others. He was
my friend and more importantly my mentor. He was the man who taught me with
great humor how to enjoy a Cuban cigar a very dry Martini, bridge, the theater
and most importantly, good food in good restaurants how to embrace life to its
fullest.

“Pat” Grissom was wounded in World War Two by a German
bullet on March 26, 1945 in the village of Lamperthiem. He remained in a
wheelchair thereafter. If that were all there were to say about him, it would
be enough. Yet for the then twenty year old farmer from Syracuse Kansas there
was so much more.

I met Pat in 1967. For reasons known only to him he
decide I was one worth saving and we became great friends and over the next
fifteen years I was regaled by his wonderful stories always told with the
loudest voice in the room and the best sense of humor as well. I’m not sure I
ever saw Pat mad. I’m not at all sure he knew how to be. He could find humor in
the most awful situations.

One of the stories he loved to tell was about being in
the field hospital after he was shot. Pat was stricken by the anxiety of how he
was going to tell his family that the bullet severed his spine since he could
not at that point imagine how he could have a wound in his back unless he was
running away from the gunfire. Finally, he screwed up the courage to ask the
doctor why the hole was there. “Oh,” He said, “That’s the exit wound, you were
only shot once,” pointing to the wound in his side, “that’s where it entered.
The other will heal in a few days.” At this point in the story, Pat would throw
back his head and with a great laugh of self-deprecation, exclaim his relief that
he needn't explain it at all.

For a time Pat was the third National President of a nascent group of veterans with spinal cord injuries. He was one of the few I
knew who lived until last Wednesday that could claim he picketed the Truman
White House for better benefits for returning war veterans. While he was president
of The Paralyzed Veterans of America, he helped get Congress to pass the first accessible
housing grant legislation. It gave all veterans who used wheelchairs a $10,000
grant to build the ramps and modify existing homes or build new ones without
obstacles. He built his own on Sunburst Street in the San Fernando Valley soon
thereafter. He lived there the rest of his life until he became a long term
care patient at the Long Beach Veterans Medical Center.

While he was busy with his trips to the Hollywood Bowl,
The Amundsen Theater, and visiting friends in Malibu, and understanding life and
its possibilities far better than most of us, he managed to survive two major
earthquakes. The first destroyed the old San Fernando VA hospital where he got his
post hospital care and the second the Northridge quake, destroyed his house
while he was sleeping in it. When the noise stopped he said, and the dust settled,
he realized that the wall to his room was gone, the fireplace lay in the yard nearly
intact, and he was gazing out on the street in the dark of the early morning.
His garage and his house guest survived so they drove his van to a friend’s
house just a few miles away which had hardly any damage where, by his
description, he remained a “homeless veteran” for the next year while he rebuilt.
By then I was living elsewhere and called a few days after the event. His message
machine was miraculously intact and I assumed my friend was well and safe. He
wasn’t obviously, and without any thought that anyone might have been worried about
him, he threw the machine away without ever retrieving the full message tape.

There is neither space nor time to tell all the Grissom stories.
He lived too long for that. He was a legend. He was a technical advisor and crowd
member along with 45 other veterans in a 1950 Stanley Cramer movie which starred Jack
Webb and Marlon Brando. The Men proved to be important at
the time, much as “The Best Years of Their Lives” was since it raised the
public’s awareness to the problems faced in re-entering society by seriously
wounded veterans.

In those early years in the Birmingham VA hospital
before all the spinal cord patients were moved to Long Beach, Pat and the rest
were visited by more movie stars than family. Seeing Robert Mitchum walk down
the hall was not a particularly big deal on a Saturday afternoon. He and the others
who experienced it would tell those of us he always called “the young pups” about these and so many
things there is as I said, neither time or space to relate them all.

Suffice to say that men like Patterson Grissom do come
this way often. They are special people, made more so by their ability to adapt
to the new life they found when they came home.

I once suggested that he was the most “rehabilitated”
man I ever met during a discussion about how to define that term. I still believe
he was despite the fact that he worked only two months after the war in a lawn
mower shop, but could recite Supreme Court citations and the latest Johnny Carson
joke with equal alacrity. He was an educated man because he made himself one
and yet he rode the train every summer back to the farm in Syracuse Kansas to visit
his parents for many years after he was injured.

He was a man of remarkable talent and fortitude who I am
sure was smiling before he went to sleep for the last time Wednesday night at
the age of 89.

I will miss him even though we haven’t seen each other
in a long time. I was one of many he helped see life as a better place. I thank
him for that as do so many others he helped in his quiet and gentle way. May he
rest peacefully now, perhaps with a good Havana and a very dry Martini nearby.